You simply can’t make this stuff up. Former French President Jacques Chirac was rushed to a hospital after being bitten by his white Maltese poodle, Sumo. Sumo has been under care for clinical depression, including treatment with anti-depressants.

Bernadette had no idea why the poodle attacked: “If you only knew! I had a dramatic day yesterday. Sumo bit my husband!”

Chirac is 76-year-old and was president of France for 12 years until 2007.

It does raise an interesting torts question. If a poodle is clinically depressed and unstable, does that qualify as know vicious propensities? Putting aside that the Chiracs are unlikely to sue themselves, the increasingly common diagnosis of animals with psychological problems raises a new dimension to the determination of when strict liability applies to a domesticated animal.

“If a poodle is clinically depressed and unstable, does that qualify as know vicious propensities?”

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I do not understand what one thing has to do with another. If humans are clinically depressed and unstable do we presume their viciousness too? I’m with Patty C let the dog be a dog and not some medicated lap ornament.

I am also increasingly concerned that JT is slowly turning against some segments of the animal kingdom. First, the derogatory crack about the smiling lizard being without seasonal cache’, then aspersions against poor little Sumo (I ask you, is that the face of a killer?), and now a horrific story about anti-rat behavior dismissed with a sniffling “I am not what you would call a rat person….” Indeed, you seem transfixed on that smiling deer. More is the pity!

The American soldier Al Queda member Omar Khadr killed with a grenade when he was 15 was an ARMY MEDIC.

A MEDIC……………….a person who SAVES lives. A MEDIC.

Jill, an introduciton to the Khadr family:

“We are an Al Qaeda family.” So spoke one of the Khadrs, a Muslim Canadian household whose near single-minded devotion to Osama bin Laden contains important lessons for the West.

In 1985, in the course of working in Afghanistan, Khadr met bin Laden and became his close associate. Sometimes Khadr was described as the highest ranking of Al Qaeda’s 75 Canadian operatives.

In 1996, he and his wife set up an Islamic charity they named “Health and Education Project International.” When the Taliban took control in Afghanistan a few months later, the parents and their six children decamped there. As he worked closely with bin Laden, Khadr became known for his militant Islamic vitriol, leading one Frenchman in Afghanistan to observe about him,” I never met such hostility, someone so against the West.”

Like other Al Qaeda leaders, Khadr disappeared from view soon after 9/11. He spent two years on the lam, reappearing only in October 2003,when Pakistani forces unexpectedly found that the DNA of one unrecognizable corpse from a bloody shootout matched Khadr’s.

The terrorism-related activities of other Khadr family members — wife, one of two daughters, three of four sons — complement their patriarch’s record.

Wife Maha Elsamnah took her then 14-year-old son Omar from Canada to Pakistan in 2001 and enrolled him for Al Qaeda training.

Daughter Zaynab, 23, was engaged to one terrorist and married, with Osama bin Laden himself present at the nuptials, a Qaeda member in 1999. Zaynab endorses the 9/11 atrocities and hopes her infant daughter will die fighting Americans.

Son Abdullah, 22, is a Qaeda fugitive constantly on the move to elude capture. Canadian intelligence states he ran a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan during the Taliban period, something Abdullah denies.

Son Omar, 17, stands accused of hurling a grenade in July 2002, killing an American medic in Afghanistan. Omar lost sight in one eye in the fighting and is now a U.S. detainee in Guantánamo.
Son Abdul Karim, 14, half-paralyzed by wounds sustained in the October 2003 shoot-out that left his father dead, is presently prisoner in a Pakistani hospital.

Fortunately, there is also one positive story:

Son Abdurahman, 21, reluctantly trained with Al Qaeda, was captured by coalition forces in November 2001 and agreed to work for the Central Intelligence Agency in Kabul, Guantánamo, and Bosnia. He returned to Canada in October 2003, where he denounced both extremism (”I want to be a good, strong, civilized, peaceful Muslim” ) and his family’s terroristic ways.

[…] File this under huh?: Former French President Jacques Chirac was rushed to a hospital after being bitten by his white Maltese poodle, Sumo. Sumo has been under care for clinical depression, including […]